Heartlines

by Susannah McFarlane

  But I’m not: it’s a thing now and I realise it’s gone beyond the writing-the-good-letter plan in which I apologise in a more empathetic way, and she says thanks and that’s it. It’s gone well beyond that. It was supposed to make us both feel good, resolved, settled, but now I am anything but.

  What have I done? This was not a good idea. I don’t want to feel this, whatever this is. I want to run away.

  And so that’s exactly what I do. I close the email and go back to my life. My real life – not whatever this is.

  I run, I run a lot, playing ABBA songs through my headphones (a big tip-off that I am not okay) and I take the dogs for long walks on the beach. And, sometimes, I try to work out why I feel so utterly at sea. Most times, though, I just keep going: I pack the kids off to school, manage family life and work, write books, go to meetings, do my emails and keep up with friends. Yet all the time I feel that something is gathering, a bit like when you see the lightning and you’re waiting for the thunder. And I don’t want it to come, I don’t want to feel it.

  It’s like I’ve opened a box, a Pandora’s box that has not only spewed all its contents on the ground but has shaken up all the other boxes on the shelf as well – there is stuff everywhere.

  The easiest thing would be to walk away, to close the box and pretend it never happened. And so that’s what I try to do.

  But I can’t. I can’t sleep, I find it hard to concentrate – I am a nearly fifty-year-old woman who was hitherto (hold on, there’s that word again) highly competent and happy and now I seem to be losing it. And I can’t work out why. I feel like I am wrestling all this stuff and the biggest thing I am wrestling with is Mum.

  Mum. My wonderful, much-loved, much-missed mum. How can I be Robin’s daughter if I am Mum’s daughter? Does a ‘connection’, being on the ‘same wavelength’ with Robin, diminish my connection, my lifelong, heartfelt, time-tested connection with Mum? Can I take that risk?

  Déjà vu

  Susannah, 17 September

  I know I have to send Robin a reply. I can’t keep ignoring it, her. I think I know how to reply. I write the letter.

  Email via FIND from Susannah to Robin

  Hi Robin

  I’m sorry I have taken a while to reply. I had a work deadline but also, I need to confess, I was a little ‘spooked’ by your last email.

  The hardest thing for me to say and perhaps for you to hear is the same thing I think I said last time we had contact: I’m not sure where to put you in my life, where you fit in.

  While I understand you see me as your daughter, I can’t see you as my mother. I had, still have in my heart, a mother whom I, quite simply, adored and I can’t let anyone else into that mother box, even bizarrely, I know, my biological birth mother. I don’t want to disappoint you but I just can’t do that. I, we, need to work out what I can do.

  To be really frank I think I have spent a lot of my life trying to prove I was good enough, good enough to be kept, that I deserved my seat at whatever table I was sitting or wanted to sit at. I think part of that came from being given up, part of it comes from Mum’s early struggles as she grieved her lost daughters at the same time as she tried to bond with her new one, and part of it is just me. Mum and I discussed this a lot (she did a lot of that, discussing, digging in for the truth) and we both came to see that it’s not about blame or fault, it’s just about what was, that everyone did their best. Everyone wonders if they’re good enough, I suspect, and I was no different, just with the little kicker of a slightly confused start. And that led, I think, to a lot of my striving for success – at school, at university and in my various careers – to prove that I was good enough.

  Ideally we balance yin and yang yet I have spent a lot of my life yanging myself along, ever-questing. A lot of success and wonderful opportunities have come from that but it’s also a little exhausting. This realisation finally came about when, one after another, both my children became seriously ill and I put myself in such full-throttle yang to help them I nearly broke. Just before I did, I was lucky enough to be able to go away for a week where I was nurtured as I recalibrated and balanced my head and my heart.

  The decision to contact you came from that time away. I finally resolved that ‘good enough’ issue. I was good enough, Mum was good enough and you were good enough. We all were, are, and, as I said in my first letter to you this time, I wanted to make sure you knew that. I’ve done that but now I confess I don’t know where to go next.

  I don’t know where that leaves us, perhaps finding a middle way with some different words around it, words that don’t scare me or make me feel disloyal to Mum. The start is probably friendship.

  How do you feel about all of that? I don’t want to simply flip the situation around to me but find a way we are both happy to continue with.

  All best,

  Susannah

  I send it to Maddy even though I know she now won’t be in the office until Monday. I think it’s done the job but I am still uneasy. Something is niggling at me and I feel unsettled.

  Love Child?

  Susannah

  Driving back from a meeting I hear a piece of classical music, I Giorni by Ludovico Einaudi and I start to cry. I am the least musical person in my family – I was told to lip-sync in a Year 5 choir and my children still mock my exuberant but apparently talent-free singing – but I love listening to music and admire the way it makes me feel things. This piece cuts through me. It’s beautiful, but why the tears? Really, Susannah, what’s going on with you?

  Luckily my family have all scattered for the weekend and I have some time alone, to see if I can sort myself out.

  I come home, download the music, pour a glass of wine and play it loud. It really is beautiful, with a tentative fragility as the violin and the piano dance together – one edging forward then receding, then forward again, reaching out and responding, yearning and comforting. In my head the piano is Robin, lower, slower, steady, and the violin a more skittish me. I play it on a high rotation my teenage daughter Emma would envy and I sit and think.

  As luck (or something) would have it, a mini-series about adoption is on TV at the time. Love Child follows a group of young women who enjoy the sexual freedom of the 1960s but without the benefit of the contraception of the next decade. It follows them as they enter a wing of a women’s hospital in Sydney where they will each wait out their confinement before relinquishing their baby to a more ‘suitable’ married couple unable to have children.

  So, I binge-watch it. I want to understand what happened back in 1965 in a way I have never wanted to before. I watch the whole series and, bit by bit, something in me crumbles. When I get to the scene where the baby is born, lifted out from behind a sheet so the mother can’t see it, I can barely see through my tears. My mind can’t help but flash between what I’m watching, the birth of my own two children, and wondering what my own birth must have been like – for both Robin and for me.

  I realise I really haven’t thought about this before. But now that I have, I’m thinking, feeling, that it must have been horrible – horrible for Robin and, for the first time, consciously anyway, horrible for me, the baby. A baby who must have been expecting to meet her mother.

  And now I’m hooked and I want to understand more, everything, about adoption at the time. I hunt down and watch ABC documentaries from the 1960s proclaiming the wonderful work adoption was doing for single mothers and childless couples alike, and watch footage of babies crying, screaming in their horrible, hard hospital cribs. No one hugs them, no one loves them – they are alone. I Google adoption websites and read testimonials from birth mothers and children: they all talk of loss and grief.

  Loss and grief. I have never thought about it in these terms before. Did I, do I, have that? How could that be? I had the most loving, wonderful family and, particularly, a mum and dad who loved me and whom I adored. How could I have loss and grief? What did I lose? What am I grieving?

  But I keep reading and the words keep
on appearing: separation, trauma, primal wounds, loss, genetic roots, genetic identity.

  And, all of a sudden, this adoption thing isn’t intellectual anymore – it’s felt. It’s something inside me. And it opens.

  Still, indulgently now, playing I Giorni, I go to my desktop and Photoshop the photo of Robin with photos of me as a toddler, as a girl, and as I am now. I’m trying to visualise a connection to my beginning, to the place I started.

  And I cry. A lot. I sit in it. That’s what my baby Buddhist mindful training would have me do – sit in the feeling, not run away from it but feel it, explore it, watch it. I am fairly sure it doesn’t say wash all that watching down with a few glasses of wine but I do that as well, desperate to pull the volume down a bit.

  And I need to, because something big has been let out, with a ferocity that has scared me, and I don’t know where to put it.

  I really wish I could talk to Mum about it, so I kind of do. I imagine her saying, ‘So, what’s all this about, then?’ in the way she would when I had clearly worked myself into a state. ‘What’s going on over there?’

  ‘Well, there’s this woman, Mum,’ I reply. ‘My birth mother, actually, and we’ve made contact and it’s made me feel all weird.’

  ‘Tell me about that, darling …’

  And so I let Mum’s patient, kind wisdom tease the emotion out of me, not letting me get away with histrionics and helping me work out what to do.

  And I realise something, which I write in my journal:

  It’s okay, you can love two mothers. You have permission.

  Whose permission? Mum’s? I think so. No, I know so. She’s okay with this.

  So, l re-read the letter I’ve emailed to Maddy and realise I’ve pretty much written the same letter I wrote in 1989, the same letter I was supposed to be improving on – Sorry, but I don’t know what to do with you, still a bit tricky, hope that’s okay, cheers. I’ve written a letter that closes doors.

  And, I realise, I do want to build a relationship with Robin after all, with my other mother.

  So, urgently, I email Maddy again and ask her not to send the first letter. I tell her I need to write another letter, one that opens rather than closes.

  Where has Susannah gone?

  Robin

  I’m getting a bit anxious now. This is definitely too long a gap since I’ve heard from Susannah. Still, I won’t panic; she has other things going on in her life. I share my misgivings with Susan, who, unfortunately, can see my point. The silence is uncharacteristic.

  But it’s not possible, is it? This whole thing can’t just vanish in a puff of smoke? The thought that maybe it could now grips my heart in fear. I couldn’t take it; it would be too cruel a disappointment. The whole restored-daughter miracle, a fizzer? No, I actually do have more faith in God than that.

  I go about my life, apparently as normal but not really. That awful anxious suspense within, invisibly tainting the everyday pleasures and pursuits of the present. Like when you are awaiting a doctor’s report, the results of tests, about which they seemed to have some concern.

  I hate living that underwater half-life. Time to do something useful: ring Maddy.

  The call is both confirming and comforting. Yes, Susannah is going through something of an emotional crisis, but Maddy believes we will weather the storm. Will Maddy communicate my distress to Susannah? Am I allowed to ask if she will? I don’t know. I’m not completely sure how she works. It may be better for me not to say anything.

  Then, at last – re-emergence! Maddy calls to tell me she has a letter from Susannah to forward to me. It feels like I have surfaced from the bottom of the ocean and can breathe again.

  Rewriting my feelings

  Susannah, Sunday, 21 September

  It takes me hours to rewrite the letter. I scrutinise every line, every word trying to ensure it says what I think I want to say, what I feel.

  Hi Robin

  Okay, just tweak the first line a bit maybe.

  I’m sorry I have taken a while to reply. I had a work deadline but also, I need to confess, I was a little ‘spooked’ by your last mail and needed to work out why.

  Then the first two paragraphs have to go; they’re just a slightly wordier version of 1989’s polite rejection. Is that what I want to do? I don’t think so but I don’t know what to say – well, say that then.

  The hardest thing for me to say and perhaps for you to hear is the same thing I think I said last time we had contact: I’m not sure where to put you in my life, where you fit in.

  While I understand you see me as your daughter, I can’t see you as my mother. I had, still have in my heart, a mother who I, quite simply, adored and I can’t let anyone else into that mother box, even bizarrely, I know, my biological birth mother. I don’t want to disappoint you but I just can’t do that. I, we, need to work out what I can do

  To be completely honest, I am finding this all much more difficult and confusing than I ever expected to. I swing between being curious, and yes, excited, to being scared and wanting to run away so I don’t hurt or disappoint anyone.

  The next two paragraphs are fine, I think. I’m being honest, explaining how I got here, how I got to her. A little softening tweak, but I’ll keep them.

  I think I have spent a lot of my life trying not to disappoint, to prove I was good enough, good enough to be kept, good enough to deserve my seat at whatever table I was sitting or wanted to sit at. I think part of that came from being given up, part of it came from Mum’s early struggles as she grieved for her lost daughters at the same time as she tried to bond with her new one and part of it is just me. Mum and I discussed this a lot in different ways at different ages (she did a lot of that, discussing, digging in for the truth) and we both came to see that it’s not about blame or fault, it’s just about what was, that everyone did their best. Everyone wonders if they’re good enough, I suspect, and I was no different just with the little kicker of a confused start. And that led, I think, to a lot of my striving for success – at school, at university and in my various careers – to prove that I was good enough.

  So, while we’re supposed to balance our yin and yang, I have spent a lot of my life ‘yanging’ myself along, ever questing, to achieve, to be good enough. A lot of success and wonderful opportunities have come from that but it’s also a little exhausting. This realisation finally came about when, one after another, both my children became seriously ill and I put myself in such full-throttle yang to help them I nearly broke. And then, just before I did break, I went away for a week – to be nurtured, to try to recalibrate my head and my heart – and to stop thinking all the time so I could feel a bit more.

  Oh no! The next paragraph. Aaaaaaaarrrgggghhhh! That’s pretty much the 1989 version too – we’re all great, we’re all forgiven. Game over. Not what you’re trying to say, Susannah. You’re not being honest about how you feel, you need to show how torn you felt when Robin called you her daughter: disloyal yet deprived at the same time. Try again.

  The decision to contact you came from that time away. I finally resolved that ‘good enough’ issue. I was good enough, Mum was good enough and you were good enough. We all were, are, and, as I said in my first letter to you this time, I wanted to make sure you knew that. I’ve done that but now I confess I don’t know where to go next. I did that but I wasn’t prepared for the maelstrom of feelings that have followed since. As you can see, I haven’t mastered this thinking–feeling thing!

  The next bit is rubbish too. Does a friend make you feel this way? Come on, put it out there, you don’t have to have all the answers.

  I don’t where that leaves us, perhaps finding a middle way with some different words around it, words that don’t scare me or make me feel disloyal to Mum. The start is probably friendship.

  I understand you see me as your daughter and I, undeniably, feel something too; the significance is there, I feel it dancing in my stomach as I write, but I can’t quite wrangle it. I have been finding it really diffi
cult to see you as my mother without feeling guilty and disloyal to Mum. I had, still have in my heart, a mother whom I, quite simply, adored and miss terribly, and I don’t know yet how to let someone else into that mother box, even bizarrely, I know, my birth mother. I don’t want to disappoint or hurt you and I do want to know you and to meet you but I’m struggling with how it all fits together.

  Better. Now tell her you have spent a lot of time thinking about your birth – how it must have been for her, for you. Ask her how it was.

  Maddy talks about the triangle of relationships and I’ve found that a helpful way to look at things and to re-look at things, to re-shape that box. And so, I’ve spent the last days trying to better understand your ‘angle’: I’ve wandered all over the Internet, watched the Jan Russ Australian Story and the 1965 Unmarried Mother documentary and I’ve re-read the rather sparse folder of my birth records. I started off trying to think through it all and ended up trying to feel it, to feel the story, yours and mine, behind all that cold paperwork.

  But you’re here, so perhaps, if it’s okay, I could ask you to tell me the story of my birth again. You have asked if I have questions and I’ve been dodging that because the ones I have are the really big ones and I’m not sure why I can’t remember everything you wrote in your first letter: what happened at my birth; what happened immediately after; how you felt? They’re really big, huge, and they block any smaller, easier ones.

  Okay, how to finish? Nup, that’s not it, too cold. Try again.

  How do you feel about all of that? I don’t want to simply flip the situation around to me but find a way we are both happy to continue with.